Open, online teaching materials for learning statistics with R
Asked to give workshop Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
Many (not all) of the archaeological teaching materials are focused on specific applications and University course materials
(nice comprehensive list: The didactic map of computational archaeology)
Something I’ve wanted to do for a while!
seems to be popular in Archaeology
Good enough practices in scientific computing (Wilson et al. 2017)
R for Data Science textbook
Data Carpentry - R for Social Scientists
Not meant to produce programmers and statisticians
Meant to enable researchers to confidently and reproducibly do their work in R
Programming concepts sparsely sprinkled throughout (as needed)
Code along
“Time to first plot” - Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel
Frequent formative assessments (a.k.a execises)
tidyverse ecosystem mixed with some base R
tidyverse ecosystem mixed with some base R
Artwork by @allison_horst.
EDA > statistical tests
Teach statistical concepts, not tests (but also tests…)
Live coding during workshops
Notes from workshops are hosted on GitHub and
generated during the workshop with gitautopush
Central repo with new branch for each workshop
Make the materials as flexible and customisable as possible:
Basics
Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)
Communication
Brief workshop (ca. 2 hours)
1-day workshop (max. 6 hours)
2-day workshop
4-day workshop
1-day workshop (max. 6 hours)
2-day workshop
Slides
Code-along materials
sheep-data.csv
Sheep astraguli data Mediterranean Iron Age.
The contribution of Mediterranean connectivity to morphological variability in Iron Age sheep of the Eastern Mediterranean Sierra A. Harding, Angelos Hadjikoumis, Shyama Vermeersch, Roee Shafir, Nimrod Marom. bioRxiv 2022.12.24.521859; https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.24.521859
Accessed from: nmar79. (2023). nmar79/Med_Sheep_Astragals: v0.1 (v0.1). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10276147 (sheep_specinfo_20230824.csv)
Modifications: removes missing values and variables that can be calculated from existing variables
mortuary-data.xlsx
Burial data from northeastern Taiwan ranging from the Iron Age through the European colonization period.
Li-Ying Wang & Ben Marwick, (2021). Compendium of R code and data for “A Bayesian networks approach to infer social changes from burials in northeastern Taiwan during the European colonization period”. Online at https://osf.io/xga6n/
Accessed from: https://osf.io/zem9p (Kiwulan_Burials.xlsx - burials sheet)
Modifications: removes some variables that need cleaning (reduce cleaning complexity)
Finding, importing, cleaning, and exploring/analysing a dataset.
1.1 Finding, importing, and cleaning
1.2 Exploring
1.3a Modelling (if modelling module is taught)
1.3b Communicating (if communicating module is taught)
Can someone else reproduce your analysis?
Participants are paired up and need to reproduce each other’s work
Each participant produces a CODECHECK-style report
Feedback is incorporated into own project
If Git/GitHub is taught, this will be done via Git
Site is built with Quarto
R environment captured with the renv R package
Hosted on GitHub Pages
Source code at github.com/rchaeology/RchaeoStats
F - Materials archived on Zenodo
A - Accessible online at rchaeology.github.io/RchaeoStats
I - Quarto and R (dependencies captured with renv)
R - Open, permissive licenses for materials and data
Development of additional modules
EDA
Modelling Data (in progress)
Communication
Research-specific modules
Version control and collaboration
Better integration between the statistics and coding
To tidymodels or not to tidymodels?
Need community to contribute topic-specific modules (other contributions are welcome)
More iterations to improve existing materials
Also thanks to early test subjects at Österreichische Archäologische Institut
Join us at UnArchaeology.nl 7th (and 8th) November in Leiden!